1. Field
The present application relates generally to online games, and more particularly to fantasy sports games.
2. Related Art
Online fantasy sports games are known in the art. These games may be played by users who interact with the game via user interfaces that allow the users to select real-life players to associate with the user, i.e., to be members of the user's fantasy sports team. Users may bid on players in an initial bidding phase, which closes before the start of game play. Users may also trade or transfer players to and from other users. Users accumulate points as the players on their team(s) score points in the game. Actions of the players in the real life games such as scoring points or becoming injured are used as a basis for corresponding actions in the fantasy sports game.
In one example, the objective of a fantasy sports game is to select and acquire a group, e.g., team, of one or more players that correspond to real-life players, with the goal of maximizing the number of game points scored by the corresponding real-life players in real-life games over some period of time, e.g., a sports season. Multiple users participate in the game, and each user is associated with one or more players that form a team. The user's players correspond to real-life players, but the user's team, i.e., set of players, is defined by the user's choice of players, which may be selected from different real-life teams. Therefore, the user's team need not correspond to a real-life sports team.
At the beginning of the game, during an acquisition phase, users select players for teams. Users may be restricted to acquiring a particular number of players, e.g., the number of players on a team for the particular sport plus some additional backup players. The players available for acquisition may be divided into classes, and users may be further restricted to acquiring a particular number of player from each class. For example, the star players who are known to consistently perform well may be in one class, and players who perform at an average level or are regarded as less desirable may be in a second class. The user may be allowed to select two players from the first class, three players from the second class, and so on for other classes.
Once a user has selected a player to be added to the user's team, the user submits a request to acquire the player. A user is said to “own” a player if the player has been allocated to that user, i.e., has become a member of that user's team, or, in other words, is “on” that user's team.
The winning user is the user whose team has the largest sum of game points at the end of the time period or sports season. The sum of game points for each user is calculated by adding up the point scored in real life by the players on the user's team. Users may be, for example, humans interacting with the game via computer program code such as a web browser executing on a client computer, which communicates with server computers that provide the game features.